The earth haunts us with forgotten lore. Of beauty, awe and guiding sensations limited by our mortal body’s frailty. 

But.

Now something is undone. Untied.

In our uprootedness, we are left naked to the sun. We haunt the earth.

Hear our call.

Come to our call little life.

And the presence seeps out from air as dew.

Music is like blood magic. It feeds both our mind and body, linking us to what we want to be and how we once were, connecting us together and empowering who we are as human beings. Music keeps us alive to the strange and uncanny, alert to bodily feelings that can hardly be expressed in mere words. The same spell casting keeps us alive to everyday experiences too, helps us understand them in new ways, and appreciate small things. Music allows us to resist the urge to explain our life away, instead keeping feelings alive, suspending and deepening experiences to exceed what is known. Because words and explanations destroy the myth of what is real about having a body as well as a mind, both so intimately as one. 

Perhaps the best way to explain Roguespeare songs is to describe the characters of some of those who sing and play them at a feast being held in the old, haunted orchard on the outskirts of a wood…

Roguespeare is the crow who brings gifts of food and found objects to the feast. Most guests arrive at the orchard from the nearby village, their feet treading paths entangled by a mesh of tree roots.

Roguespeare is the ghost that waits for them. Hers is the empty chair at the table set with her own special plate and cup she will never use. She was once a scientist, a local woman, and in the twilight and stolen sunlight of lanterns hung from yew branches above, she is now quite indistinguishable from the smoke of the cooking fire, the smoulder of incense and sage sticks and the powdery wings of moths. Knowing that her future is not what it was, she looks to the high table draped in white linen where sits the prince who summoned her.

Roguespeare is the dreaming prince awakened from a long immortal sleep bound with nature’s decay and growth. He sits now with one eye looking upward. Prince Roguespeare watches the crow swoop down to perch upon the standing stone at the orchard’s edge. He ponders the strangeness of his realm. He bids the crow, his uncanny friend, to reveal the secrets worn into the stone by years, and smiles into the soft air nested in the clearing with the low hum of many gathering voices.  

• Instagram

Follow Roguespeare on Instagram